I’ll admit that I was a little surprised by President Nelson’s public and forceful admonition to supplant the term “Mormon” with the full name of the Church, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”. His statement appears on the Church’s Newsroom site as follows:
The Lord has impressed upon my mind the importance of the name He has revealed for His Church, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We have work before us to bring ourselves in harmony with His will. In recent weeks, various Church leaders and departments have initiated the necessary steps to do so. Additional information about this important matter will be made available in the coming months.
The responses to his statement have been quite predictable, ranging from a Jordan Petersonesque rejection of free speech restrictions and absolutist “You’re rejecting the prophet if you don’t comply” views to positivist (“President Hinckley tried this years ago and it was a marketing disaster”), non-compliance critical (“Why is Mormon Newsroom called just ‘Newsroom’ now but still located at www.mormonnewsroom.com?”) and invariantist (“Why would the Church first promote its affiliation with the term ‘Mormon’ with the I’m a Mormon campaign, but now retract that connection?”). In my survey, discourse surrounding the name adjustment seem to involve a few key themes:
- The age-old supremacy conflict between institutional authority and individual conscience
- The legitimacy of a seemingly pedantic stylistic naming standard
- The function of a group name in constructing group identity and mediating individual responsibility
My personal view is that the push to use the full name of the Church, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”, carries monumental positive potential. Using the Church’s correct name promotes accuracy in discourse about the Church in the context of other Mormon churches, pressures members to affiliate out of integrity instead of compliance, and helps immunize the collective membership against group identity attacks.
1. Fostering Precision to Facilitate Accurate Discourse about the Church
An obvious reason for pressuring use of the Church’s full name in colloquial and formal use is to distinguish the Church from other similarly named organizations, many of which diverged from the Church in previous history and teach doctrines that negate or conflict with official Church doctrine. There exist at least 20 religions that diverge from the church originally organized by Joseph Smith, Jr. on 06 April 1830 and many of them diverged from the mainline Church precisely because of doctrinal conflict. Potential for misattribution of offshoot groups’ doctrine to the Church has always challenged the Church’s growth, especially when offshoot groups’ practices affront generally accepted social mores.
Graphs tracing the history of these offshoot groups are complex, and many groups contain “Latter”, “Saints”, and “Church of Jesus Christ” in their names. Confusion of these groups with the Church seems still imminent even if all Church members were to use the Church’s full name in colloquial usage, but the specificity of using the full name in disambiguating the groups is certainly better than using the term “LDS”, and undoubtedly better than using the more global terms “Mormon” or “Mormonism”, which in cultural research circles often signal the entire Latter-Day Saint movement.
In addition to emphasizing the Church’s focus on Jesus Christ (the lack of which some disaffected members criticize[1]), using the full name is a sign of respect and compassion to people not versed in the pedigree of Mormon churches that have peppered the religious history of the United States.
This stance is not surprising, given that President Nelson’s career as one of the world’s leading cardiac surgeons depended critically on the use of precise language. Many of the conflations of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with other Mormon churches are often completely avoidable. Though many active Church members would likely recognize a demand on investigators and non-members to cogently discern the Church’s place in the Mormon church pedigree (perhaps even suggesting that mistaken conflation of the Church with offshoot groups indicates spiritual immaturity—for example, “He must not be ready for missionaries if he is convinced the Church still practices polygamy”) as clearly entitlist, this is the message we help co-construct by playing fast and loose with the term “Mormon”.
By using the full name of the Church and, by extension, adopting a more precise nomenclature that may seem pedantic, we are actively creating a culture of specificity that better serves members and non-members of the Church. Increased accuracy in discerning our affiliation to a specific church allows those investigating or questioning to make more informed decisions about whether to be baptized or stay active. It also fosters and encourages transparency regarding the Church’s history, as unpopular or disturbing facts can no longer be attributed to only divergent offshoot groups—this pressures us to directly and truthfully confront our collective past and present immaturities, which in turn pressures opponents of the Church to confront their own[2] and increases the potential for people to trust the Church’s organization and members.
2. Promoting Integritous Affiliation
Related to the accuracy that a more pedantic but more precise nomenclature offers are the important psychological effects on the way Church members construct their identity in relation to their affiliation with the Church. The push to use the fully-qualified name of the Church, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”, represents a long-needed and unquestionably beneficial shift towards deconstructing the inappropriate conflation of the Church’s unique doctrinal framework and teachings with a number of annoying and sometimes downright toxic cultural practices of some of the Church’s members.
Many members construct their affiliation with Church largely in terms of cultural performance[3]. For some members, compliance to cultural norms holds as much or greater weight than deliberate, informed application of principles of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in relevant areas of their lives. For example, some members believe that marriage after one has reached a certain age necessarily indicates spiritual immaturity, unworthiness, or rebellious repudiation of prophetic counsel. Others hold that one’s spirit is in dire danger unless one reads the Ensign every month, or remains on one’s knees for a full minute after ending a prayer in order to hear God’s answers. While well-intentioned and with possible support from scriptures and statements from General Authorities, constructing a sense of “Mormon” identity based on mere compliance to cultural norms or even to legitimate commandments can be very problematic.
Living in a compliance-based identity can deeply undermine one’s development and progression towards exaltation. We take comfort in absolutist thinking and in the idea of Church leaders and members who provide inerrant counsel at every turn of life’s vicissitudes, and in the easy external validation that results from our compliance, even when that compliance won’t truly pressure us to develop our God-given capacities and traits. While it’s false to say that compliance has no value, especially when first learning a gospel concept, remaining in that frame encourages an unhealthy dependency on other people. We co-construct our misery by believing that we need others’ validation in order to feel truly good or virtuous, creating vulnerabilities by which others can manipulate us against what is truly good for us.
Advocating for a technically correct appellation of the Church and redefining members long ensconced in Mormon-branded coteries as mere individuals forced to choose affiliation or non-affiliation for themselves pressures members to avoid the ungodly compliance-complacence pattern of culturally validated membership. Exposing the reek of this lifestyle is a legitimate critique in many inimical anti-Mormon commentaries. Instead of fluently passing off cultural compliance for loyalty to a lifestyle and mission defined by Christ’s teachings, we must now construct individual identities, with full possibility of others’ invalidation, and choose whether to include Christ’s gospel in them.
Calling ourselves “members of the Church” rather than “Mormons” also emphasizes the idea that affiliation is a choice that is continually made, not a one-time declaration of a culturally validated identity that will never be challenged against one’s integrity (which closely mirrors the evangelical sola fide doctrine that the Restoration repudiates). Constructing one’s identity as a Church member is much more aligned with the scriptural pattern of continual self-appraisal demonstrated in Alma’s remonstrances towards the Zarahemlites in Alma 5. In an integrity-based frame of living, one must take more ownership for the choice to affiliate or disaffiliate, even when it is hard. Self-definition can be frightening, not just due to risk of invalidation, but also because it necessarily involves defining who and what you will not be. Coming to peace with yourself about what you want to create with your life, and accepting that your limited resources and strength preclude always shining in the eyes of your group, is a large part of God-like process of exaltation.
Similarity to Other Recent Church-wide Changes
It’s worth noting that the theme and presentation of the Church’s name adjustment is consistent with other Church-wide changes announced thus far into President Nelson’s tenure, including the consolidation of home and visiting teaching into a singular ministering concept, as well as the near-total jettisoning of high priests groups. To me, these three changes center around pressuring Church members to shift from a compliance-based frame of living to an integrity-based frame.
Though one published reason for the near-disbanding of high priests groups was to make available to younger elders the experience and wisdom isolated in high priests groups (in some situations, elders ordained to be high priests never return to or rarely affiliate with their previous colleagues), I believe that there may have been another potent reason for this adjustment. I believe that, in some (but not all) Church units, high priests group meetings may have become a type of “old men’s club”: a place where, for an hour, members could tie their age to a sense of superiority, averting personal growth, and imagining the inerrancy of their perspectives by virtue of age (eg., Laman and Lemuel’s logical fallacies in 2 Nephi 5:3). I think it basically became a place where one might have almost said, “I’ve made it. I’ve been faithful in the Church, and my great-grandchildren have all been married in the temple, and now I can sit back and relish in my successes with my chums and discuss deep doctrine for an hour.”
This, of course, isn’t universal, and there is, of course, nothing inherently evil about rejoicing in the good fruits of one’s righteous and legitimate efforts. But it’s clear to me that growing into a sense of entitlement by falsely conflating the near-finality of one’s mortal life with one’s ongoing and largely incomplete spiritual development helps neither that person nor other less-experienced members nearby. Individual spiritual progress will be ongoing for millennia, and one needs to accept and acknowledge the reality of one’s continually underdeveloped state without interpreting that reality as a tarnish on one’s own identity, or seeking for other peers to reassure one’s sense of self (à la Laman and Lemuel, perhaps). Bringing high priests back into the game, so to speak, seems like a wonderful way to facilitate this. As with the Church’s name adjustment, this change carries a linguistic shift from “high” priests to “elders”, which could be interpreted as an emphasis on one’s continued post of responsibility rather than on one’s attained social status.
The collapsing of home and visiting teaching into a unified ministering program is possibly a more obvious statement of the need for integrity-based living. It’s telling that Elder Holland’s last General Conference message on ministering before the official change rejected both a checklist-based attitude of being in relation with others of God’s children and a transactional, compliance-based way of measuring adherence to Heavenly Father’s command to “watch over the Church always” (see D&C 20:53).[4] These themes had likely been considered at least since 2016 (the year of that talk), and were expanded and propounded further in the April 2018 general conference. Home and visiting teaching efforts were remodeled to incorporate a much more feminine approach of being in relationship with others—ministers are enjoined to be so trustworthy to and invested in their ministerees that ministerees can trust them with intimate details of life and instinctually turn to them in times of crisis.
The new ministering efforts target individuals’ holistic well-being, more closely resembling the Compassionate Service efforts within the Church’s Relief Society than “priesthood service”. The new ministering program, really a restatement of what I believe was always the higher ultimate goal of the old home and visiting teaching programs, is to be grow into a pattern of intentional, relational involvement with others. As with other Church programs, it directly combats the technological atomization of individuals in today’s post-modern societies and enjoins the greater levels of intimacy and connectedness that I believe are critical for high-level functionality in post-mortal celestial societies. Again, an important linguistic shift accompanied this change: the shift from “teaching” efforts to “ministering” indicate a shift from overt, complying behaviors to deeper, less transactional relationships.
The pattern with the Church’s name adjustment is the same: a shift from validation-based living to the more godlike (and ultimately more satisfying) frame of integrity-based living, in which one derives self-actualization from actively and continually constructing one’s own exaltant development by building the kingdom of God on the earth, rather than by vulnerably relying on flawed, fickle humans to provide that satisfaction.
3. Mediation of Group Identity Attack Vulnerability
An third important byproduct of the name adjustment is that fostering integritous gospel living in the Saints provides some insulation against group identity attacks. Often, individual members of the Church are envisioned to carry the (perceived) traits of one or more Mormon collectives. This is an example of a divisive distribution fallacy. Or, inversely, the Church as an entire institution is envisioned to carry the undesirable traits of an individual member or members (similar to a compositive distribution fallacy).
By instead constructing members as independent automatons who continually choose affiliation rather than involuntarily assuming an expansive Mormon identity, the Church is directly defusing group identity attacks that depend on these fallacies. (It’s worth noting that the atomization encouraged by the name adjustment is an atomization of agency and accountability—really a restatement of the second Article of Faith—not the intimacy-avoidant atomization of relationships mentioned before.)
Many ideological conflicts between proponents and opponents of Church organization, doctrine, and leadership can be expressed as a co-construction of both parties. For example, pro-Mormons identify as a group, collecting dissidents into a single “anti-Mormon” group and using anti-Mormons’ repudiation of doctrine or leadership to justify not addressing real cultural and social immaturities present among the collective of active members. Similarly, the collective of Church opponents point to active members’ refusal to address or even acknowledge prophetic fallibility or cultural injustices as justification for disaffiliation or offense against Church members.
Group identity tactics often instill anxiety and fear about members of the outgroups. They also obscure the true issues causing conflict by conflating the outgroup with the conflict, and thrive in a compliance- and validation-based environment. What is difficult is that addressing one’s own immaturities and flaws is often the only way to break the deadlock, and the Church comes into understandable internal conflict about doing this because it seems to compromise the message it bears to the world. The way out of this conflict, in my opinion, is to deepen one’s understanding of truth to include both the divinity of the message of the restored gospel and the fallibility of the individuals presenting it. As Jennifer Finlayson-Fife notes, this requires a shift from compliance-based living to integrity-based living.
Given the rich historical hindsight of the Book of Mormon, whose people frequently applied similarly flattening labels (eg., Jacob’s functional definitions of Lamanites vs. Nephites in Jacob 1:14) despite notable exceptions within each group (eg., the children in the time of King Benjamin, Abish, etc.), it’s very telling of our immaturity that we continue to repeat their tactics. Again, many Church members take comfort in simplistic, absolutist framing of compliance and non-compliance to published standards and policies as necessarily indicative of total good or evil. This masks the intricacies and variegated life histories that influence overt behavior in an individual, and many disaffected with the Church lament (legitimately, in my opinion) the feeling of being intentionally misunderstood.
Thus, using the full name of the Church in referring to members is one way the Church is taking the very mature step of addressing the group identity politics that it has helped foster among its members. (Member Jeremy “Gogo” Goff interprets the name adjustment as God calling on His own Church to repent.) By encouraging members to see themselves as individuals who individually choose affiliation and a gospel lifestyle, the change confronts outsiders’ and opponents’ distribution fallacies with the reality that active Church members vary widely in individual agentic religious practice, and “deficiencies” in performance cannot be attributed entirely to a religious institution (or to the devil). It also pressures members and other individuals to partition the Church’s doctrine from the cultural or traditional practices of its members and to be more accurate about what exactly seems or feels offensive (although, in my opinion, the Church could better facilitate this pattern of higher-level thinking by explicitly declaring the conflation of Church doctrine and the culture of Church members as two separate concepts, not simply renaming it “the gospel of Jesus Christ”).
In my opinion, such a way of living is more in keeping with the scriptural ideal of individual accountability for actions (see Mosiah 29:38 and Article of Faith 2). Deficiencies in leaders can now be better contextualized within the reality of telestial life, which includes that person’s individual underdevelopedness. I believe that this is the view God takes of fallible mortals, and this view makes it easier to tolerate the childishness, indifference, and even cruelty of associates in the Church without illogically jettisoning the entire Church and the blessings it offers us even while we are in pain.
Conclusion
The adjustment to prioritize more consistent and persistent use of “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” as the name of the Church, as well as the corresponding admonition to construct one’s membership as an integritously deliberated choice represent a much-needed cultural shift among members of the Church. The change promotes precision in language that is compassionate to those unfamiliar with our Church’s history and establishes basic defenses against common distribution fallacy attacks.
Hearing about this change and contemplating the swath of cultural issues connected to the Church’s name has reinforced my testimony of the prophetic calling of Russell M. Nelson. I believe that the cultural adjustments in progress under his administration can better extend the compassion and Atonement of Jesus Christ to people who have desperately thirsted for it amidst the reality of cultural false traditions that stymie their sincere search. I have great hope that similar changes will come with President Nelson as the Prophet, and express my faith that Jesus Christ is a personal Savior to each of us and the propagator of all that is good about godlike living.
I see these changes as an expression of our Heavenly Parents’ love and concern for us. They have not forgotten us, and are doing all that they can to advance our happiness and progress towards true, full self-actualization—essential components of a rich, eternal life.
Anecdotally, one of the big pushes behind the emphasis on Sabbath Day quality arose in part from a sacrament meeting sometime in 2014 or 2015 to which Elder Holland took an investigator friend. The story goes that members seemed inattentive, the bishop was collecting tithing before the meeting, and it felt clear that people weren't attending with intention. A separate story holds that during a fast and testimony meeting, people bore testimony of ancillary facets and programs of the Church, but didn't mention Jesus Christ even once. ↩︎
The co-construction of relational conflict and the concept of indirectly pressuring development in a relationship partner by pressuring one's own development are common themes in the canonical gospels and in the work of Jennifer Finlayson-Fife. ↩︎
Brad Wilcox in Filling Your Testimony Tank: "If there's one thing that [Mormons] do, we do church." (Approximate quotation.) ↩︎
It’s worth noting that over approximately the same time frame, several key indicators have been dropped from the reporting requirements for full-time missionaries. Currently, missionaries report on just five periodic key indicators:
- Number of people baptized
- Number of people confirmed
- Number of people with a date to be baptized
- Number of people who attended sacrament meeting
- Number of new people being taught
